


i want this and i won’t be denied

by postcardmystery



Category: Matthew Swift Series - Kate Griffin
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-15
Updated: 2012-10-15
Packaged: 2017-11-16 09:46:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/538156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/postcardmystery/pseuds/postcardmystery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The city speaks. It tells of a man whose eyes are wrong and whose hand is scarred. It tells of a man who pulls light from the streetlamps and who melts the tarmac beneath his feet. It tells of an undead man who will not die.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i want this and i won’t be denied

We are the crackling on the other end of the line. We know your sort code, your Dad’s mistress, your midnight secrets that you tell only because you are weak and London is so very big. We were blue before we knew what colour was. We speak with the voices of eight million, and when we sing the whole city turns black. We are power and light and glory. We be blue electric angels.

Our name is Matthew Swift. This is not our story.

 

 

 _Make me a shadow on the wall_ , I said, and we still ask.

The city speaks. It tells of a man whose eyes are wrong and whose hand is scarred. It tells of a man who pulls light from the streetlamps and who melts the tarmac beneath his feet. It tells of an undead man who will not die.

They’re talking about me, except they’re not. Matthew Swift is dead. I am we, and us are me, and Matthew Swift’s eyes were brown. Cities run on stories, drag them out of the dark to make the dark less frightening. We shine, but we were born in darkness. I’m a sorcerer. I know what power is. Stories have power. We used to be a story. I never was. Here’s where it gets complicated.

 

 

The Matthew Swift whose eyes were brown; his hands shook at night. The city hooked into his centre, the pull of a tide he could never quite fight. He would’ve gone mad with it, sooner or later, and he did not know it, but that makes it no less true. All sorcerers are prophets, in some way or other, and Matthew Swift saw his own death in puddles and fag ends and the dull dark of the city sky. His heart beat to the rush hour, his lips whispered traffic laws and hymns and the numbers of the stock exchange. 

All sorcerers are prophets, in some way or other. Matthew Swift had brown eyes. Matthew Swift had London split into his skin like metal staples through scar tissue. Matthew Swift was not us, was not me, and he was quite mad enough already.

 

 

I am not Matthew Swift. I am, of course, behind the existential bollocks and the sleight of hand. (Even if mine is marked by crosses, carved on a plane deeper than mere flesh.) But existential bollocks holds a lot of weight in my line of work, and it’s hard to argue the fact that my eyes weren’t always blue. I don’t recognise them in the mirror, even after all this time. Talk about cognitive dissonance. In the night, we sing, and I listen to their music, feel it curl around the slash in my chest like fog. My feet are nailed to the tube station floor and my wings are spread across more souls than I could count in a lifetime. We sing, and no one asks us once for our busking license. Suppose the poor bastards know better. We close our eyes, and our irises burn through the lids. We do not change our tune. I don’t either, but then, you knew that already.

 

 

We are not the blue electric angels. Our wings are clipped, and it is beneath mortal skin we burn. Our tongue is hot and wet and cannot sing our songs. We itch for the cable and the plug socket and the crackle of the pylon. We live, but we are locked in a prison, flesh upon flesh, and we rot from without to within. We are not the blue electric angels, but I look in the mirror, and blue looks back, all the same.

 

 

We do not remember dying, but then, we did not die.

Stories are about power, not truth. I died, but everyone does, when their time comes. We sang from the telephone box, and I discovered that I did not have a time. My skin is hot and pale and my blood sings electric, and I did not die, we cannot die, but it is around every corner, and it does not care what we think about the matter. 

I’m already dead. Who gives a fuck, mate?

 

 

The tube is a story, its tracks the greatest source of our power. I can ride the tube for hours, on a good day. I sink deeper and deeper, forget and remember and speak in a hundred tongues, fall in love over and over again. You could ask me what I learn on those days, and I could never tell you. You could ask us why we do it, and all we’d do is smile.

 

 

_Make me a shadow on the wall._

Blue fingertips, a city inherited, every life in it mine and ours and no-one’s. They made me a shadow. They granted me a city. They made me a shadow on every single wall.

It’s life’s little ironies, eh?

 

 

London is a story, we are a story, magic is life but magic is a story, and so is life, in its way. Our narrative was cut but our strings were pulled, and I died and I died and we got back up, and we no longer cast a shadow, our lights burning too bright and too sharp and too glorious.

Stories are just a matter of perspective, and so’s our city. But it’s ours, all right, and the only perspective you’ll see otherwise is flat on your back under the Bakerloo line. It’s ours and you can’t have it, and there’s no point asking me nicely. There’s no point making threats. There’s no point asking me at all.

 

 

_Make me a shadow on the wall._

Here is the story you don’t get to hear: you ask and you ask and you ask, and the city whispers  _yes_.

Our eyes are blue and my hair is black and my prayers were answered, and I’ve asked a hundred, a thousand times, but guess what? You only get a  _yes_  once.

They made me, we are me and us am I, and we are how stories end, it’s just that the story, as it turns out, wasn’t mine.


End file.
